In Praise of Reason

Notes

1 Hope and Reason 1. Kevin Trudeau, Natural Cures: What “They” Don’t Want You to Know About (Alliance Publishing, 2006), p. 327. Among other things, Trudeau’s book claims that we can change the structure of DNA just by thinking about it. 2. From a sample of 1,007 adults, aged 18 and older, conducted June 1–3, 2007. See Frank Newport, “Majority of Republicans Doubt Evolution ,” Gallup News Service, June 11, 2007. 3. According to an August 2006 survey from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 62 percent of respondents said that scientists agree on the validity of evolution; “Many Americans Uneasy with Mix of Religion and Politics,” August 24, 2006, p. 16: http://pewforum.org/Politics-and -Elections/Many-Americans-Uneasy-with-Mix-of-Religion-and-Politics .aspx#3. But a Gallup poll from February 11, 2009 suggested that fewer than 4 in 10 Americans believe in evolution themselves. Frank Newport, “On Darwin’s Birthday, Only 4 in 10 Believe in Evolution,” Gallup News Service, February 11, 2009. 4. David Masci, “How the Public Resolves Conflicts Between Faith and Science,” The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, August 27, 2007. Masci is referencing a Time magazine poll from October 2006. Notes 142 Notes 5. Strictly, we can distinguish between sense-perception as such—the act of forming immediate beliefs by way of your senses, and what I am calling “observation”—the act of drawing inferences from senseperception , consciously or not. The latter, but not the former, is generally not thought to employ your reason as such, but in normal adult human experience the two are inextricably intertwined. 6. Many philosophers have taken “reason” in a still narrower sense, to mean the ability to grasp that certain propositions are true independently of experience, or a priori. I have no quarrel with a priori reasoning per se; but in this book I am more interested in the sense of “reason” we have in mind when we think of scientific method as exemplifying reason. 7. See C. Dunbar, One Nation Under God (Oviedo, Fla.: Higher Life Development Services, 2008), Russell Shorto, “How Christian Were the Founders?” New York Times Magazine (February 11, 2010), pp. 32–47, and James C. Mckinley, Jr., “Texas Conservatives Seek Deeper Stamp on Texts,” New York Times, March 10, 2010. 8. This is what the philosopher Paul Boghossian seems to suggest when he says, “[The claim] that we cannot hope to justify our principles through the use of those very principles is not true in general, it is true only in the special, albeit important case where we have legitimately come to doubt the correctness of our own principles.” Paul Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 100. 9. David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals in Enquires Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3rd ed., ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), IX, 1, pp. 272–273. My invocation of Hume here is influenced by Simon Blackburn’s discussion of the common point of view, and its relation to civility, in his Ruling Passions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 210–211. See also Rachel Cohen, “The Common Point of View in Hume’s Ethics,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57 (1997): 827–850. Notes 143 10. J. Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, ed. J. Bohman and W. Rehg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), p. 72. 11. On “public reason,” see John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 212–213. But where Rawls (p. 213) imbues public reasons with three functions, I am only emphasizing what he calls the “moral duty” of civility—the idea that we should aim to explain our views to each other by appeal to reasons that could, ideally, be accepted by all. For a nuanced criticism of the greater Rawlsian view on public reason, see Gerald Gaus, “Reason, Justification, and Consensus,” in Deliberative Democracy, p. 214. See also Habermas’s critique of Rawls: “Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’s Political Liberalism,” Journal of Philosophy 92 (1995): 109–131. 12. Jean Hampton, “Should Political Philosophy Be Done without Metaphysics?” Ethics 99 (1989): 791–814. 13. An important recent, if very different, defense of...